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Downshifting is not any more just a lifestyle of a group of people. It spreads out to all spheres of human life.Downshifting in culture
Obvious.Downshifting in social sciences
Modern social science is stagnating as never before in the human history since last years of Roman Empire. There are no wars of fabulous revolutionary doctrines as it was in the recent 3 centuries. One can find neither any new great doctrines, nor brilliant scientists/philosophers/visionaries.

Is really de-industrialization of the West caused entirely by the industrial production paradigm shift, similar to one occurred during the first industrial revolution? What is the real share of totally-automated labour in the entire production chain?

Are not shrinking industrial sector, death of the middle class in Europe and USA and growing unemployement caused rather by outsourcing to countries with cheap labour rather than by a new generation of machinery able to completely supercede humans in the production cycle?

It would be natural to assume that last 40 years while scientists and engineers have been doubling the number of chips per square inch each 24 months and CPU performance each 18 months, the human intellectual capital in the semiconductor indistry grown (at least) proportionally. This trend is quite natural to extrapolate: entire information technology sector must have developed its human capital hugely and not only in headcount but in the total human capital quality as well.

It looks like big IT modernization projects driven by government are prone to fail. A an example we can take Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration IT project. It has been terminated and restarted again from scratch several times before. Last attempt does not look to to be a full success either, despite first triumphal messages:Finally a successfull NAV project, (in Norwegian), Computer World Norway Jan. 2015
Let us just look at this:

Tablet sales in free fall
"It is sold 700,000 fewer tablets last year compared to 2013. It is a decline of 36.7 percent. In this way one third of tablet market vanished without a trace."
See also "beware: buzz!"

There have been attempts on the market to come up with hyhbrides and transformers. So far the commercial sucess was at best limited. This autumn several manufacturers annonced new products marking a kind of rennaissance for a tranformer PC. Will it be any better in the light of decreasing consumer interest to "plane tabs"?